BREAKDOWN: Starting a Bitcoin Startup During the COVID-19 Crisis, Feat. Yan Pritzker
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2020
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Yan Pritzker is the CTO and cofounder of Swan Bitcoin, an automated bitcoin only investing app aiming to be the best onramp to bitcoin. He is also the author of Inventing Bitcoin.
On this episode, he and NLW discuss:
- How immigrating from the Soviet Union taught Yan about capital controls
- Buying bitcoin at $30 in 2011
- Why the type of capital available shapes what type of startups entrepreneurs found
- Why venture capitals focused investments away from bitcoin
- The emergence of a bitcoin only startup scene
- Starting a startup during the COVID-19 crisis
- Why bitcoin’s scarcity is its most important property
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW. |
| 0:15.0 | The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:20.0 | Welcome back to the Breakdown. |
| 0:22.7 | It's Friday, guys, April 24th, and today I am joined by Jan Pritzker. |
| 0:29.0 | Jan was previously the CTO and co-founder of Reverb.com. |
| 0:34.6 | He was the author, he is the author, of inventing Bitcoin, which is all about the technology |
| 0:40.2 | behind Bitcoin. And he is most recently and currently the CTO and co-founder of Swan Bitcoin, which is a |
| 0:48.3 | Bitcoin-only startup for on-ramping people into the Bitcoin world. This conversation is really about that emergence of |
| 0:57.5 | a Bitcoin-only industry, how it came to be, why venture capital and just capital in general |
| 1:03.5 | creates the industries around it based on what type of capital is available. We also talk a little |
| 1:09.4 | bit about Jan's personal journey, immigrating from |
| 1:12.3 | the Soviet Union, understanding and learning about capital controls. We talk about how capital |
| 1:17.1 | controls and freedom of money is such an important issue for so many places around the world. |
| 1:23.4 | So this is a fun conversation to end the weekend, really, really focused on the Bitcoin ecosystem |
| 1:29.3 | and the why of it from a founder of a company trying to build in the context of a huge crisis. |
| 1:36.3 | I had a great time with this conversation. |
| 1:38.3 | I know you'll enjoy it too, so let's dive in. |
| 1:41.3 | One quick note, as with all of our long interviews, this is edited ever so |
| 1:46.6 | lightly to preserve the natural flow of the conversation. All right, I am here with Jan Prisker, |
| 1:53.3 | Jan. How are you doing? I'm great. Thanks for having me on. So you are doing a crazy thing right now, |
| 2:00.0 | which is starting a Bitcoin business, |
| 2:01.8 | but you're doing it in an extra crazy way, or at least in an extra crazy time. |
... |
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